Book Review: The Race Beat

The 43-year-old Rosa Parks sitting alone in a bus in Montgomery. Elizabeth Eckford surrounded by an angry mob in Little Rock, Arkansas. The valiant James Merideth writhing on the ground after being shot on a Mississippi highway. Buses ridden by an interracial group of riders being attacked and lit in flames in Alabama. Waterhoses blasting hundreds of protesters in Birmingham. The attack of peaceful demonstators at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma during what came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”

And, of course, Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, delivered before a crowd of 250,000 at the Washington Mall.

These images, and the courage of the people who placed their lives in harm’s way, changed the nation.

The story of the modern civil rights movement has been told and retold in many different forms.

A less-told story, though, is the role of the media in the movement
that riveted the nation, led to the dismantling of segregation and the
passage of landmark voting and civil rights legislation.

The Race Beat starts with Swedish scholar Gunnar Myrdal’s classic two-volume work, An American Dilemma, in which he outlines the nation’s injustice and admits of the possibility of change.

The book is largely chronological, and follows the movement from the post World War II period through the unanimous Brown v. Board decision that overturned decades of legal segregation officially sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, and continuing through the major civil rights battles and setbacks in the South.

The book takes at its climax the moment of Bloody Sunday, with a brief coda that mentions John Lewis’ election to the U.S. House of Representatives as evidence that the problems Myrdal identified had been resolved to some degree.

This arc has been traced many times before, but never in such depth this way.

Roberts and Klibanoff show how for years the black press had almost
exclusive access to civil rights stories because white newspapers did
not consider the story worth covering. Once the issue got wider
attention from mainstream media publications, journalists from black
publications were often pushed aside while their counterparts from
bigger newspapers got more and better access.

This replication of power relations within media coverage is just one of many praiseworthy aspects of the book.

Roberts and Klibanoff have a keen feel for the southern media landscape, which included giants like Atlanta Journal-Constitution editor Ralph McGill, whose views evolved with the movement, and right-winger James Kilpatrick, whose writing about the doctrine of interposition gave desegregation opponents intellectual ammunition.

Roberts and Klibanoff effectively show the interplay between events,
and the coverage of them, in the gradual broadening of attention given
to the movement, and in the impact the movement had on the nation’s
conscience.

Neither progressed in a straight line.

Roberts and Klibanoff do not hesitate either to show moments where
the movement sustained defeats, like in Albany, Georgia, where Chief Laurie Pritchettavoided
the kind of newsmaking scenes that garnered headlines, stirred
consciences and forced legislative action. Similarly, they take
venerable publications like The New York Times to task for missing the story’s significance for years before assigning Southern-born Claude Sitton to the area.

In addition to tracing the movement’s growth and the role the media
played in it, The Race Beat is a story of engaging individuals living
through an era when the world as they had known it was undergoing
decisive shifts and changes.

The authors devote extensive time to journalistic legends like McGill, but also to lesser-known people like Harry Ashmore, editor of Little Rock’s largest paper, or Joe Azbell of the Montgomery Advertiser, or Gene Patterson,
the Journal-Constitution editor who wrote a haunting piece after a
bomb blast killed four little girls in a Birmingham church.

Patterson’s essay was remarkable for its imagery-it returned over
and over to a shoe held by one of the mothers-but also for its
assumption of collective responsibility by white Southerners, rather
than simply the extremists who bombed the church.

“We hold that shoe with her. Every one of us in the white South holds that small shoe in his hand,” Patterson wrote.

The juxtaposition of the hearbreaking reminder of the girl’s
innocence, her brutal death and the role bystanding Southerners had
played in the murder was groundbreaking and, as with McGill,
represented an evolution on Patterson’s part. Walter Cronkite later
asked Patterson to read the entire column on his newscast, and
thousands of viewers responded to Patterson’s moral outrage.

The authors do not only focus on white journalists; black journalists like the late photographer Ernest Withers, James Hicks of the Amsterdam News and L.C. Bates all
receive treatment. Roberts and Klibanoff show neatly how for many of
these journalists, the issue was more than one of professional concern,
but was part of a mission of community uplift.

Above all, The Race Beat is the story of a time of wrenching,
painful and often bloody change in the nation, but also an evocation of
a bygone era in journalism.

During this time television had not completely ascended and
editorials, decisions made by daily editors and coverage by their
correspondents shaped public perception to a far greater degree than
today, when an increasing number of readers get their information
throughout the day via the Internet.

The stakes were high, the stories were raw and waiting to be told,
and daily print journalism truly was “the first draft of history.”
The beauty of The Race Beat lies in how Roberts and Klibanoff depict
both so vividly.

The book is not perfect.

The civil rights movement in the north gets scant attention, and
then only in the context of Dr. King’s struggle in Chicago. The later
electoral gains of the 70s and 80s are similarly ignored. And the
degree to which racism has been vanquished is a subject that is up for
legitimate debate.

Still, in a time in which we have seen the initial presidential
actions by America’s first Black president, and during a month in which
we honor the contributions of Blacks to the nation, it is
fitting to reflect on the modern civil rights movement and the role
that hundreds, if not thousands, of people played in documenting that
valiant effort to close the gap between the nation’s lofty promises and
its often sordid reality.

The Race Beat does so, with honesty, elegance and, at times, even grace. I recommend it highly.

Read this online at http://colorlines.com/archives/2009/03/book_review_the_race_beat.html

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